Category: Musicology

Paris, 19-21 March 2019

Call for Papers

The manuscript Paris, BnF, lat. 1139 is a composite manuscript whose origins are not precisely known. It was preserved in the library of the abbey Saint-Martial de Limoges, one of the most prestigious book collections of the Middle Ages, since as early as the middle of the thirteenth century. The manuscript includes the first expressions of a new way of singing divine praise. These compositions do not so much break with older traditions as add to what already existed.

The oldest and most important part of the manuscript (end 11th-beginning of the 12th century) contains many festive chants: tropes, versified songs (versus and Benedicamus domino, so called nova cantica) troped epistles and liturgical drama (ff. 32r-117r). Also added are votive offices for the BVM, notated in the thirteenth century (ff. 119r-148r), a full sequentiary dating from the end of the twelfth century (ff. 149r-228v), and parts of two other sequentiaries of the thirteenth century (f. 2r-20v). Throughout the manuscript, one can also find texts about liturgical practice and the daily life of the abbey (such as an inventory of altar ornaments, a list of the books in the library, and so on).

This heterogeneous anthology thus allows us to observe repertories sung during as much as two hundred years as well as evolution in the liturgical practices of specific types of celebration. As a diverse collection it reveals the creative dynamic and cultural exchanges enjoyed by Saint-Martial, whilst at the same time indicating a wide network extending across Southern France and beyond.

This manuscript is an exceptional book, that attracted at an early stage the interest of scholars:

– It includes some of the oldest testimonies of Aquitanian polyphony.

– It has the oldest collection of nova cantica.

– It includes several liturgical drama, among them the Sponsus, which is unique to this source.

– It sits at the crossroads between Latin and vernacular repertories.

– The notator of the oldest part used a sign in the form of a rhombus to indicate semi-tones. This notational particularity was quickly abandoned in the South of France but was widely adopted in the West of the Iberian Peninsula, especially in Portugal.

An inventory of the oldest part was made by Hans Spanke (1931); Judith M. Marshall devoted her entire, mainly analytical PhD dissertation (1961) to lat. 1139. Jacques Chailley (1952), Sarah Fuller (1969) and Leo Treitler (1978) also included this manuscript in their studies of the Aquitanian repertory. It appears that many chants copied in latin 1139 have concordances in sources not only from Southern France but also in the festive offices of the Circumcision from Beauvais, Sens and Le Puy (Wulf Arlt, 1970, 2000) in addition to other manuscripts from further afield.

This conference is open to scholars from many disciplines (history, art history, history of literature, musicology, philology, palaeography…) in order to tackle all the aspects of this complex manuscript. The meeting will provide an opportunity to fill lacunae in the historiography, especially in dealing with the more recent sections of the manuscript. We will therefore consider the manuscript itself, and, at the same time, attempt to place it within a wider context, beginning with the abbey of Saint-Martial and then within networks of creation and dissemination beyond the Limousin territory. The specificity of this conference will lie in the assessment of the circulation of artistic and intellectual practices. From this perspective, latin 1139 will be the starting point for a renewed study of creativity at the heart of the Midi and of its spread in space and time, but the manuscript itself will not be the only focus.

Papers might deal with the following themes (but are not limited to these):

Influence: comparison of Paris, BnF, latin 1139 with other sources

– palaeographic questions, both musical and textual; the use of the neumatic characteristics of the manuscript’s notations in other traditions (above all in the Iberian Peninsula);

– musical and literary features of the repertory;

– codicological approaches, presentation, layout and decoration of the manuscript in relation to a larger context of manuscripts.

Dissemination: Saint-Martial de Limoges as a musical and artistic centre

– the position of Saint-Martial with regard to the dissemination of repertories and artistic practices from the Limousin into other regions;

– the abbey as a creative centre as well as its reception of external material;

– the circulation and transfer of manuscripts to and from the library of Saint-Martial;

– the liturgy and communal life of the abbey, as revealed by the musical repertories and the non musical additions in latin 1139.

Circulation: the reception and destiny of repertories notated in Paris, BnF, latin 1139

– consideration of the dissemination, networks of repertories notated in latin 1139: manuscripts from Norman Sicily, offices of the Circumcision, German manuscripts including the Carmina Burana, Cantatoria from Prague, etc.;

– relationships between the repertories of latin 1139 and Parisian sources of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (nova cantica, sequences);

– consideration of the complex material aspects of the manuscript as testimony to ways of using books and repertories: transformations and re-compositions in response to new needs;

Fifteenth symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Iconography of the Performing Arts
organized by the Societat Catalana de Musicologia, Institut d’Estudis Catalans

Barcelona, 17–19 October 2018

Iberian peninsula—the home of Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Basque, and Galician peoples—has been a significant economic and political region through the history, which had been both conquered by the powers coming from elsewhere and generating its own forces exploring and conquering other regions and cultures in the world. From the Bronze Age onwards, explorers and traders used the peninsula as the crossroad between the Mediterranean and much of the rest of the world. The Phoenicians came to Iberia in the ninth century BC, and the Greeks followed two centuries later. The Romans conquest of Hispania started during the second Punic War in 206 BC and by the time of Augustus near the entire peninsula was under the control of Rome. During the Middle Ages, Al-Andalus with its Islamic administration was open to an import of Arab knowledge, philosophy, culture, arts and music. Later on, Spain and Portugal were the strongest naval powers in the world and their overseas explorations have radically altered both the old and new worlds: Spain influenced South American and Caribbean cultures, and even the Philippines; the Portuguese travellers, traders and conquerors reached Brazil, sailed along the African coast, and arrived all the way to India, Malacca, and Macao. Through the crown of Aragon, Catalonia experienced cultural exchanges within the western Mediterranean Sea and southern Italy. In addition to the overseas networks, cultural and artistic exchanges were also occurring in Europe through commercial and political ties, and also through marriages between the royal houses. Throughout the history pilgrims walking the Camino de Santiago, or visiting the shrines of Montserrat or Fatima were bringing with them songs, dances and instruments from all over Europe.

All these and many other explorations and migrations created a fertile framework for a rich exchange of musical ideas, sounds, forms, rhythms, dances, and instruments. The Barcelona conference of the ICTM Study Group on the Iconography of Performing Arts will examine visual sources documenting transborder and transcultural transmission of musical ideas between the peoples of the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of the world. Papers are invited concerning the following topics:

Sounds of the ancient world: The Iberian cultures in an exchange with other Mediterranean traditions

Islamic sounds in Al-Andalus

Music and dances of Spanish Sephardim

Music along the road: Travelers and pilgrimages in Spain and Portugal

The Borgia family as a mediator of musical life between Iberia, Rome and the Vatican

CityMAC 2018

5-7 July 2018, City, University of London

The City Music Analysis Conference (CityMAC 2018), sponsored by the Society for Music Analysis (SMA), will take place on Thursday 5th to Saturday 7th July 2018 at City, University of London. This international conference will feature analysis of world music, but welcomes paper proposals on any aspect of theory or analysis relating to music of any genre and historical period.

For paper sessions: 250-word (maximum) summary and up to 200 words for each session participant

For roundtable discussions: 250-word (maximum) and up to 150 words for each panel participant

For recitals, lecture-recitals and lectures illustrated by sound diffusions or audio-visual screenings: 250 word (maximum) summary, plus participant CVs and recordings / scores / other details of works to be included in the event (contact the organiser to discuss)

Student members and individuals without access to institutional funds are eligible to apply for an SMA Travel Bursary to help cover the costs of travel and accommodation. Further details can be found here: http://www.sma.ac.uk/grants/travel/. Please note that the deadline for application for bursaries is 7 June 2018.

Delegates are also welcome to apply to our Development Fund scheme to cover the cost of attending. For further details, see: http://www.sma.ac.uk/grants/development/. There is no deadline for this fund, but retrospective applications will not be considered.

The relations between the music made in South America, and that made in Europe, and in North America has been characterized at times by efforts to approach, some others times by rejection, many times resulting in peculiar hybrids. These same relations reflect in music criticism and in aesthetics, sometimes reinforcing the similarities, sometimes invoking the differences, or even having to deal with musical phenomena for which no specific vocabulary has been invented yet. We part from the argument proposed by Joseph Kerman, «repertories are determined by performers, and canons by critics» (‘A Few Canonic Variations’, in: Critical Inquiry, x/1, Canons [Sep. 1983], pp. 107-125), evoking the strength of the discursive network that develops around musical creation, performance, and its aesthetics. This conference intends to explore the rich and multifarious relations between music-making — understood in a very broad sense — and music criticism and aesthetics that, in some way, deal with or reflect the North-South relations.

The programme committee encourages submissions within the following areas, although other topics are also welcome:

The reception of European and North-American music in South America;

The reception of South-American music in Europe and in North America;

Nationalisms and the adaptation / rejection of foreign models in Music Criticism;

The official languages of the conference are English, Spanish and Portuguese. Papers selected at the conference will be published in a miscellaneous volume.

Papers are limited to twenty minutes in length, allowing time for questions and discussion. Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words and no more than 200 words of biography.

All proposals should be submitted by email no later than ***Sunday 5 May 2018*** to <conferencecriticism2018@ia.unesp.br>. With your proposal, please include your name, contact details (postal address, e-mail, and telephone number) and (if applicable) your affiliation. The committee will make its final decision on the abstracts by the end of May 2018, and contributors will be informed immediately thereafter. Further information about the programme, registration, travel, and accommodation will be announced after that date. For any additional information, please contact:

Following on the from the success of the York Conference on Church Music held in February 2017, the organising committee for Church Music & Worship invite proposals for this two-day international conference to be held in the Pemberton Rooms at Durham University and Prior’s Hall at Durham Cathedral on the 27 and 28 April 2018.

Call for Papers

We invite researchers and practitioners to submit proposals which engage with a range of methodologies and perspectives on church music and worship, from academic and practice-based viewpoints. Proposals are encouraged on the broad theme of church music and worship which may address, but need not be limited to, the following topics:

Church music and liturgy

Church music and the media

Church music compositional practice

Church music, gender, and sexualities

Historical perspectives on Church music

International perspectives on Church music

Theologies of musical worship

Please find information on the next two pages about how to submit a proposal and our supporters. Any questions at all may be directed to the chair of the conference committee, Enya Doyle, at churchmusicandworship@gmail.com

Submission Information

We particularly welcome submissions from postgraduate students.

We also welcome scholars who may want to or have to bring children with them.

Individual Papers

Proposals for papers should be sent as abstracts of not more than 350 words. Individual papers should be 20 minutes in length and will be followed by 10 minutes of discussion.

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Panels

Proposals for organised panels of 3 speakers (1 ½ hours) and 4 speakers (2 hours) should submit a panel abstract (200 words) and individual abstracts (350 words each) in a single document together with the full names and email addresses of the participants. Questions about the organisation of panels should be directed to churchmusicandworship@gmail.com

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The following format should be used for proposals (send in a word doc or pdf):

Music Research Center at Hanyang University is pleased to announce an international conference “Rethinking Sound 2018,” to be held on 30–31 March 2018 in Seoul, Korea.

Sound has long been the subject of interest to scholars and practitioners alike, but it has gained more popularity in recent decades; the sheer number of scholarly publications in what one may call “sound studies” testifies to this statement. As the ways in which sound is produced and consumed are continuing to change, we suspect that sound will be of central concern to many of us. What soundscapes are around us, and how do we react to soundscape? Is there any evidence suggesting that the way of thinking about the world is shifting away from “ocularcentric” to “aural-centric”? What are the implications of such a shift? How does (re)thinking about sound help us (re)define human subjectivity?

In attempting to answer these questions, we invite proposals for individual papers (20 minutes) on any topics related to the conference theme “Rethinking Sound,” broadly defined. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Historical/cultural/geographical soundscapes

History of listening

Human-computer interaction (HCI) with sound

Mediated sound/listening

Sound and disability studies

Sound and ethics

Sound and film

Sound and gender

Sound and noise within/outside musical works

Sound and subjectivity/identity

Sound and the body

Sound in video games

Sound, space, and mobility

We welcome proposals from scholars and practitioners as well as early-career researchers and graduate students working in all musicological disciplines.

Submissions, in English, should comprise a paper title, an abstract of up to 250 words, and a short biography of about 150 words. Please email submissions in PDF or Word format to rethinking.sound@gmail.com by 31 December 2017.

Rethinking Sound 2018 is supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea.

In Nigeria, the high pressure to follow the copyright rules of the globalized pop music market restrains the use of samples in hip hop culture. In Egypt, young musicians have no credit cards, leaving them without access to the online music market. In Europe, second and third generation migrants discuss their non-European backgrounds and European identities in songs and tracks. And U.S.-produced Korean pop music (K-Pop) increasingly rivals Korean-produced K-Pop in its concern for authentic presentation.
Issues of power, position, access, and representation have shaped the production, distribution, and reception of popular music and continue to do so today. The three-day interdisciplinary conference Pop – Power – Positions highlights popular music’s embeddedness in a global world. It seeks to uncover and scrutinize the risks, challenges, and potentials of power structures, positioning, and (re)presentations in popular music. The analysis of global, postcolonial structures plays a central role in this endeavour. To date, however, music– and popular music in particular – has only rarely been studied using postcolonial perspectives.
Postcolonialism refers not only to the historical fact of colonialism and its political, geographical, cultural, and economic impact on the countries and regions involved. Rather, postcolonial studies deal with all aspects of cultural diversity, ethnic and cultural difference, and their related power structures. Colonialism as well as postcolonialism refer to hierarchies that are enacted and produced through the construction of the Other and bring about and enforce debateable concepts of representation such as gender, race, ethnic group, nation, class, and culture. In this regard, the effects of (post)colonialism can be detected not only in former colonialized and colonising countries and regions, but also in those which at first sight do not have a colonial heritage, for example Switzerland.
From its beginnings, popular music has been produced and performed in and within (post)colonial (power) structures. Postcolonial traces are, according to Johannes Ismaiel-Wendt, inherent in any popular music (2011). Current productions of popular music in different countries show that (post)colonial conditions live on in popular music, especially in a globalised world, and that musicians as well as recipients react in various ways to this situation.
The conference focuses on (global) power relations and representations of race, cultural difference, ethnicity, gender, class, and nation, including the changes and subversive strategies these may involve. Ethnographic and analytical studies of popular music in and from (former) colonised countries and regions are also welcome.

We invite papers that address the following range of topics and questions:Power
– Who speaks in popular music? What kinds of power structures shape the production, distribution, and reception of popular music? What is the impact of the Anglophone music business on other music markets? Who speaks about popular music in the areas of marketing, advertising, journalism, fan cultures, (global) politics, and educational institutions – and what vocabulary do they use?
– Have digitalisation and digital networks led to a democratisation of musical processes, or the contrary?
– What sounds and music(s) are processed in what contexts by whom and how, and to what aim? How does the use of certain sounds/music(s) point to existing power relations, dependencies, and availability?Place
– What role do geographies and geopolitics play in popular music-making? How do geography, world order, and power structures relate?
– In what ways can popular music exist beyond cultural, ethnic, and national geographies? What role does the relation between the Global North and Global South have in popular music?Positions
– How do structures of power and distribution limit the access to the production and reception of popular music?
– What relevance, usability, and impact do technologies (like Digital Audio Workstations) or legal regulations (like the copyright laws) that have been developed in Western contexts have for popular music? In what ways are (post)colonial structures and power relations (re)produced therein?
– What kinds of representations do musicians use for their marketing? What traits are ascribed to music?Postcolonialism
– What potential does popular music hold for detecting and changing (or enforcing) colonial and postcolonial power structures?
– How can postcolonial theories be made fruitful for an up-to-date understanding of popular music?
– How do musicians of different forms of popular music process a „(post)colonial experience of the world” („(post)koloniales Welterleben“, Ismaiel-Wendt) in their music?Popular Music Studies
– How marginalised are specific popular musics within the history of popular music?
– Should or can we write a Global History of Popular Music?
– In what way is the concept of popular music in itself (post)colonial?
– What hierarchies, asymmetries or restraints can be found in inter-/transdisciplinary Popular Music Studies?

Keynote: Dr Jenny Fatou Mbaye (City University London)

Contributions on popular music that lie outside the scope of these topic areas are
welcome and will be considered if possible.

The 2018 centenary of the Representation of the People Act (6 February 1918), which granted the vote to many women in the UK, yields an ideal opportunity for sustained critical reflection on women’s suffrage. This conference seeks to explore the artistic activities nurtured within the movement, their range and legacy, as well as the relationships between politics and art. In striving for an inclusive, transnational reach, it will at the same time seek to move beyond traditional emphases on white middle-class feminism and explore the intersections between the regional, national, and global contexts for women’s suffrage with specific respect to the arts.

While proposals addressing any aspects of women’s suffrage will be welcomed, this conference will focus upon three strands:

Women’s suffrage in/and the arts

Women’s suffrage in Surrey and the surrounds

Transnational networks and flows of texts in relation to women’s suffrage

20-minute papers are invited on any aspect of these strands, including but not limited to:

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women’s writing on suffrage;

Political reflections on the arts and the cultural sphere, e.g. in music;

Transnational networks and mobilities of political texts and ideas, incorporating suffrage movements in other countries;

Contributions of women of colour to suffrage movements in Britain and globally;

Art (both historical and contemporary) inspired by women’s suffrage.

Proposals for panels of 3–4 papers (1.5–2 hours) are also warmly welcomed, as are proposals for one-hour roundtables of 3–5 participants. We encourage proposals from postgraduate students and independent scholars in addition to institutionally-affiliated established academics.

Planned activities include a panel discussion featuring artists who have been active in performing and creating works based on women’s suffrage and some of its key figures; a recital of the music of Dame Ethel Smyth; and a visit to the nearby Watts Gallery. We envisage that an edited publication will be developed from papers presented at the conference.

Abstracts of not more than 300 words should be e-mailed by 26 January 2018 to suffragecentennial@surrey.ac.uk. Decisions will be communicated to speakers by 23 February 2018. A limited number of student bursaries may be offered to offset costs of attendance.

The advent of autoethnography, a form of qualitative social science research that combines an author’s narrative self-reflection with analytical interpretation of the broader contexts in which that individual operates (e.g. Etherington, 2004; Chang, 2008), has come at a critical time for the discipline of music. In the UK, the expectation of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) that creative practice outputs will be contextualised through an accompanying commentary signals the urgency for establishing scholarly structures suited to the discussion of one’s own work by performers, composers, and music technologists alike.

The recent inauguration of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), meanwhile, places a renewed emphasis on pedagogic research, for which autoethnography will increasingly prove to be critical in facilitating discourse on individual teachers’ experiences, in anticipation of the upcoming subject pilot for TEF and discipline-level evaluation being implemented more widely thereafter. As a methodology, autoethnography also yields enormous breadth of potential elsewhere in music studies, with the capacity to support academic enquiry encompassing individual experiences as listener or concert-goer, habits and modes of music consumption, and conduct as fans or aficionados.

While autoethnographic approaches have received significant application to the discipline of music internationally, for instance in Australia (Bartleet & Ellis, 2009) and the US (Manovski, 2014), this study day aims to raise its visibility at such a timely juncture in the UK. It will thereby consolidate the seminal contributions made by isolated studies in areas such as music education (Wiley & Franklin, 2017; Kinchin & Wiley, 2017), sonic arts (Findlay-Walsh, 2018), and composition and performance (Armstrong & Desbruslais, 2014). It also offers significant opportunity to initiate dialogue with academic fields as disparate as the social sciences, education, and health studies, in which autoethnography is more substantively practised.

At the same time, this study day will bring together composers, performers, musicologists, and music teachers, seeking to explore different modes of autoethnography with a view to establishing an analytical vein in continuation of previous work undertaken within music studies (e.g. Bartleet & Ellis, 2009). With an emphasis on transcending the production of so-called ‘mesearch’ – work that merely draws upon the author’s autobiographical description in an academic context – the event will cultivate modes of engagement in music research that enable scholar-practitioners at all levels to locate their experiences within a robust intellectual framework as well as to articulate their relationship to wider sociocultural contexts.

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

20-minute papers (plus 10 minutes for questions) are invited on any aspect relevant to the study day’s themes.

Proposals for panels of 3–4 papers (1.5–2 hours) on a closely related topic are also warmly welcomed, as are proposals for roundtables (3–5 participants, 1 hour duration). The latter should be thematically integrated and dialogue-based rather than simply a series of unconnected mini-papers.

Note that papers will be expected to offer some critical self-reflection on method, and not merely to set out ground covered in an individual’s own practice. Those that adopt non-traditional formats, or incorporate a practice as research component, will be warmly welcomed.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be e-mailed by 12 January 2018 to Christopher Wiley, c.wiley@surrey.ac.uk (enquiries to the same address). Decisions will be communicated to speakers by 5 February 2018.

The registration fee will be £20 per person (reduced rates of £10 available for students/the unwaged), including lunch and refreshments. A limited number of bursaries will be offered to students/the unwaged to offset travel costs, up to a maximum of £60 each.

Surrealism and music in France, 1924-1952: interdisciplinary and international contexts

Senate House, University of London, Friday 8 June 2018

Paris was the principal centre of surrealist activity and the focus of connections between surrealist literature, ethnology, sociology, visual arts and music. The links between surrealism and the emerging disciplines of ethnology and ethnomusicology redefined the concept of exoticism in France and were the subject of a good deal of polemical debate. However, connections between surrealism and music have been little explored, although it is clear the movement had a decisive influence on major French composers such as Pierre Boulez, Olivier Messiaen and André Jolivet. This study day initiates a transdisciplinary and international dialogue and will situate music at the heart of these debates. The day will end with a linked piano recital by the outstanding young pianist Alexander Soares.

We welcome paper proposals – in English or French – from music, literary and other scholars on relevant topics including:

In what senses can music be ‘surrealist’?

The emergence of ethnology and ethnomusicology in Paris and its relevance to artists, specifically composers

The Paris Exposition Coloniale Internationale (1931), the foundation of the Musée de l’Homme and their impact on the artistic/musical scene

The Central/South American connection to Parisian surrealist arts and music

Text settings of surrealist poets

The international dimension of surrealism and its impact on French musicians

Proposals (300 words), in English or French, for 30-minute papers and a short biography (100 words) should be emailed to Dr Caroline Potter: Caroline.Potter [at] sas.ac.uk by 31 January 2018. Enquiries may also be sent to this address.